Shark Teeth Collection Is Growing!

[worthy 55]

Nice teeth! Good job on the images!

What's the story on the yellow root on the mako . . . is that one from Peru?

That one is from Chile, Harry I do not know why it has that yellow root.

Thanks

[worthy 55]

Gorgeous!

do I see representatives from Bakersfield and Chile, among others?

Yes, they come from Chile,Bakersfield,Virginia,NC and Florida.

Thanks

[worthy 55]

Thanks for all the nice comments eveyone!

[siteseer]

Bobby,

I've been meaning to get to this point because it pops up occasionally. The elasmo.com tooth to which you refer is the same one in Mark Renz' book, "Megalodon: Hunting the Hunter" on pages 105 and 106 (noted as "Bakersfield, California land find...Pliocene") and it is almost certainly not from Bakersfield. The problem is that not everyone keeps track of the teeth they find. Many can go unlabelled or are given only the most general locality data before the actual site is forgotten. Many shark teeth from as far away as Coalinga are sometimes said to have come from "Sharktooth Hill."

As you noted, it could have come from the Etchigoin Formation which can be dug in the Elk Hills Oilfield area or on part of Hwy 33 both of which are also in Kern County so that could be what "near Bakersfield" means (though Kern County accounts for a lot of square miles in California). I've never seen a tooth from the Etchigoin though - just a couple of bone pieces from a site in the Kettleman Hills.

Also, like you said, a tooth like that has never been reported officially or unofficially from a major museum collection. I can also tell you that none of the longtime STH collectors I've ever met has one or has seen one in another private collection going back to the 1950's.

That tooth has a color and some apparent manganese staining like some STH teeth but a range of colors with varying degrees of manganese encrustation is also seen in some Pliocene teeth from Orange and San Diego Counties. It's just that we don't see many of those great whites because a lot of the sites are gone now.

Jess

Also, don't count on ever seeing a single great white from the Sharktooth Hill Bonebed. The one they show on ELASMO.com probably isn't from the bonebed, and its locality data is sketchy to begin with (the only loc. data with the tooth is "Near Bakersfield"; it was probably collected from the nearby and stratigraphically higher Etchegoin or San Joaquin Formations (both are Latest Miocene and Pliocene). If Carcharodon did actually occur in the STH bonebed, there would probably be at least one tooth in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History or University of California Museum of Paleontology (which have the largest collections of STH fossils worldwide), they would exist in those museums. But they don't.

Carcharodon carcharias doesn't appear in the rock record until about 6.0-5.5 MYA, just below the Mio-Pliocene boundary. I've got a bunch of them in my collection from Santa Cruz County (Purisima Formation).